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Human kind has finally scraped beneath the barrel

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We are all aware of the selfies and the vacuous creatures who post them every two minutes – but now those self obsessed youngsters have crossed the line of awareness into the darkness of their own ego. Selfies at Funerals, Holocaust memorials, at former Polish concentration camps, war memorials and other inappropriate locations.

What have we become? When did we decide that the leaps and bounds of technology were to be shared with the idiotic and pointless creatures that think this is appropriate:

All these have appeared on a Tumblr site entitled “Selfies at Serious Places” and launched this year in August. Two days after posting this picture the idiot in the picture received hundreds of complaints so he contacted the site to have it removed:

“I’m one of the people on your tumblr blog, and I have to say you made me realize how much of an idiot I made myself look. I’ve had people messaging me and calling me stuff, all of which I obviously deserve. I know you probably think I’m just an idiot who is willing to put pictures like that on the internet, and you’re not too wrong. You’ve really made me think about it, and I’d like to thank you for that. Now I’m going to beg that you remove the picture, and I doubt you would, because you will gain absolutely no benefit from doing so, but from one severely regretful person to another person, please, do so. Sorry for being such a dick.”

I applaud the fact he apologised for this despicable photo – but here’s the thing: the photo was taken in 2012 so this person had a year possibly longer before they decided that this was an appropriate thing to send to someone to publish. But this is not necessarily about blame because in my eyes they are as equally idiotic as each other and deserve little sympathy. The person who runs the pages claims that every generation does things that embarrass them and with the right technology they too would have ended up producing these vile images. True – but that doesn’t make it right either.

There is a saying that “youth is wasted on the young”, but it’s more than this I think brains, time and effort re too often wasted on the ignorant. We all make mistakes in life – I certainly have and continue to on a regular basis – but there is a line and these guys have crossed it with their funereal self portraits and at locations that deserve respect. While they might not be affected by them many others are and it’s disrespectful. It’s silly to take the photo in the first place, but to then decide that it needs a wider audience is a complete lack of understanding of decency. Then there is the person who publishes them and thinks it’s an appropriate site to set up in the first place.

Tumblr should be removing such images as they don’t do anyone any favours in terms of PR, but also it makes us look bad as humans. There is already so much ignorance in the world – just yesterday a student actually said that they believed the majority of Muslims were terrorists, a statement that defies belief and makes me question so much in our society. Everyone now has a platform – just as I do here – to say what they think and project their views and I’ll always support that, but someone really needs to start taking these people aside and give them a slap. They know they are in the wrong yet they still go ahead with it and we need to save them from themselves if nothing else.

Humans are flawed, narcissistic, naïve creatures at times and we se he worst of our species everyday on the news. No, they haven’t physically harmed anyone and yes there are much worse things that they could be doing – but if I ever found out my kids had done something like this you can be damn sure they’d never again get near the technology that allowed them to do this in the first place. Perhaps the answer is to send these types of images to the guilty party’s parents and let them deal with it and see how long these sites and trends last.